Everybody looked at Matt. Matt looked down at his uncomfortable black shoes. He would have given anything to have been with Runt the night Keegan’s cowboys caught up with the little guy.
“That’s right, keep pressing them,” Father Conley said. “Maybe they don’t know it yet, but times are changing. One of these days you’re going to knock them out of the box for good.” He looked at Matt and said, “I can help you. But I can’t do it for you. It takes leadership.”
Matt looked down at the sidewalk. He always felt strange in his dark blue suit. He looked over at Fran, talking with some of the other wives. In his mind, Fran and the storage company and the welfare of the kids were all churning around with Runt and what Father Conley was saying and the faces of these dock workers looking at him and waiting for him …
The morning after the funeral Matt’s alarm clock split the silence at six-thirty. Matt swung his legs over the side of the bed. Fran stirred behind him. “I’ll get up make you some coffee.” She sat up and they looked at each other.
“I’m sorry, Fran, I—”
“Don’t be,” she said.
Even before what happened to Runt, she had felt it coming. And on the way home from church he had said, “All the fellers liked Runt. There’ll be hell to pay. Now’s the time to get ’em movin’ in the right direction.”
Fran, sitting up in bed behind him, said, “Don’t get in no more trouble than you can help, Matt.”
Matt stood up and stretched, groaned, and reached for his pants. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna watch myself, I ain’t gonna take no crazy chances like Runt, Lord-’ve-mercy-on-’im.”
She wasn’t even disappointed about the storage job. A storage man is a storage man, a longshoreman is a longshoreman. In the deepest part of her mind she had known that all along.
“I’ll get up make you some coffee,” she said again, as she had a thousand times before, as she would—if he was lucky—a thousand times again.
For a moment he roughed her up affectionately. “You’re gettin’ fat, honey.” Then he was pulling his wool checker-board shirt on over his long underwear. If there was enough work, Fisheye was liable to pick him, just to make it look good in case there was an investigation.
The cargo hook felt good in his belt. He zipped up his windbreaker, told Fran not to worry, set his cap at the old-country angle, and tried not to make too much noise on the creaky stairway as he made his way down through the sleeping tenement.
Flanagan was coming out of his door as Matt reached the bottom landing. The old docker was yawning and rubbing sleep out of his eyes but he grinned when he saw who it was.
“Matt, me lad, we’ll be needin’ ya, that’s for sure.”
We. It had taken Flanagan a long time to get his mouth around that we. There wasn’t any we over at the storage company. Matt nodded to Flanagan, a little embarrassed, and fussed with his cap like a pitcher.
“Once a stand-up guy, always a stand-up guy, huh, Matt?”
Matt grunted. He didn’t want them to make too much of a deal out of it. Matt felt better when he got outside and the wind came blowing into his face. It felt good—like the cargo hook on his hip, familiar and good.
As they reached the corner, facing the elevated railroad tracks that ran along the river, two figures came up from a basement—Specs Sinclair and young Skelly. Specs had a bad cold. He was a sinus sufferer in the wintertime. He wished he was down in Miami scoring on the horses.
“So you want more?” he said to Matt, daubing his nose with a damp handkerchief. “We run you out of here once but you ain’t satisfied. What’s a matter, you lookin’ to wear cement shoes?”
Matt gazed at him and felt pleased and excited that he was back with this old hoodlum Sinclair and this punk Skelly. They were like old friends in reverse.
“Quit racing your motor,” Matt said. “It ain’t gonna be so easy this time. None of us is gonna go wanderin’ around alone half-gassed like Runt Nolan. We’re stickin’ together now. And Father Conley’s got the newspapers watchin’. You hit me in the head and next thing you know they’ll hit you with ten thousand volts.”
Specs looked at Skelly. Everything was getting a little out of hand, there was no doubt about it. In the old days you could knock off an old bum like Nolan and that was the end of it. This Matt Gillis, why didn’t he stay in cold storage? For the first time in his life Specs worried whether Lippy Keegan would know the next move.
Matt crossed the street and pushed open the door of the Longdock. Everybody knew he was back. Everybody was going to be watching him. He wished Runt would come over and stick him in the side with a left hand. He knew it wasn’t very likely, but, as a boilermaker was set in front of him, it made him feel better to wonder if that scrappy little son-of-a-gun was going to be watching too.
A
SECOND
FATHER
Mrs. Samuels was interviewing a new chauffeur when Chris came in from school.
“Hello, Mommy.” He kissed her, dutifully, on the cheek and she cuddled him a moment, asking him the automatic question, How was school today? Then she told him to run along and play, she was very busy now.
“Is Daddy going to take me to the ball game tonight?”
His mother smiled politely at the applicant chauffeur to forgive the interruption.
To Chris she said: “I’m sure Daddy will do his best, dear.”
“Well, he promised …”
“Yes, I know, but—” Chris’s father was the head of a film studio, a job that seemed to consist of an endless series of “conferences” running on into the night. He was always promising Chris things that had to be called off at the last minute because he was “tied up.” Mrs. Samuels did her best to explain this to Chris but it was difficult for Chris to understand. Why couldn’t his Dad simply say, “Look, people, I have to end this conference in ten minutes. I have a date to take my son to Gilmore Stadium.” Why couldn’t it be as simple as that?
“But he did promise,” Chris said again.
“Chris, I’m busy now.”
“You like ball games, sonny?” asked the man talking to his mother.
Chris turned and looked at him. He was a square-jawed, ruddy-complexioned, well-built fellow with black curly hair. He was smiling at Chris an unusually warm and winning smile that immediately communicated something important to Chris. The man likes me, he thought. Grownups from the picture studio were always telling Chris what a wonderful man his father was and how they hoped Chris would grow up to be just like him. Usually they said this with a little, fond pat on Chris’s shoulder, but the ten-year-old boy was never completely sure they liked him.
“Chris loves to go with his father to fights and ball games,” his mother answered for him. “Of course his father is terribly busy, so—”
“When I was a kid I used to watch ’em play almost every day,” said the stranger who liked Chris. “Of course I never had money for a ticket. I got awfully good at climbing those telephone poles.”
He laughed easily, the skin crinkling around his eyes in straight lines like the sun rays in Chris’s drawings. Chris always felt like laughing when other people laughed. Chris’s mother smiled indulgently, something in her manner saying, And now let us get back to business.
“You say you have no references here in Los Angeles?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve been with a family in Westchester, New York, for the past three years, ma’am. I did all their driving and filled in as a butler for their parties. I even used to give Mr. Hawthorne a rubdown on Saturdays. I’ve been a physical education instructor.” Then he turned toward Chris and said for his benefit, “I even did a little professional boxing when I was a kid.”
Chris noticed that the man’s nose was slightly dented about two thirds down the bridge. Chris liked the way it looked. It made the man look tough and formidable and yet he was handsome and had a nice smile.
“What’s your name?” Chris asked the man suddenly.
“James,” the man said, �
��James H. Campbell. H for Hercules. I weighed fourteen and a half pounds when I was born.”
“Are you going to be our new chauffeur?”
James smiled. “That’s up to your mother, young man.”
“I hope so,” Chris said.
The chauffeur grinned. “Thank you.” He turned to Mrs. Samuels. “I like kids. We always get along fine.”
Chris went over to his mother. “You are going to make him our new chauffeur, aren’t you, Mommy?”
Mrs. Samuels’s expression was one of gracious embarrassment.
“Now, Chris, will you please go out and play and let me finish this interview.”
That evening, as Chris had feared, his father called from the studio just before dinner to say how sorry he was that the Catherine the Great script had hit a snag and it looked as if he was going to be tied up with the writers for hours. They were blocking out an entirely new final sequence. He hated to disappoint Chris about the ball game but he would take him to the next L. A.-Hollywood game a week from Saturday. That was a promise.
Chris went up to his room and slammed the door. It wasn’t fair. He went back to the door, opened it and slammed it again. When he heard his mother coming he threw himself on his bed and started to cry loudly. His mother was not sure whether to scold him for slamming the door or sympathize with him in his disappointment.
“Chrissy, you mustn’t give in to your temper like that. Daddy works very hard for you. He can’t help it if he has to work so hard.”
Chris gulped back his sobs.
“Is James coming back, Mommy?”
“James?”
“The new chauffeur you were talking to.”
“Oh, the chauffeur. Well, I don’t know. I also talked to a Japanese boy.”
“Please, Mommy. I want James.”
Mrs. Samuels looked at her only son, a tow-haired, rather frail child who, in the opinion of his father, needed to be toughened up. One trouble was that Sol Samuels was much too busy to do anything about it and Alma Samuels liked his being “poetic” and soulful. She was always saying how sensitive he was.
“Chris, if James doesn’t work out, well, I don’t like to see you disappointed.”
“Oh, Mom, I know he will. I just know it.”
Sol really should make a little more of an effort when he promises him these baseball games, Mrs. Samuels was thinking. “All right,” she said. “We’ll try him. Just try him, you understand.” She fondled the back of Chris’s head. “Wait ’til I tell your father that you’re hiring the chauffeurs now.”
James moved into the chauffeur’s room above the garage that Sunday evening. Next morning Chris was up especially early so he’d have a chance to talk to James before school. One trouble with his father was that he never got up until after Chris had gone to school. That way days, even whole weeks, would go by without their seeing each other. Mrs. Samuels was always explaining how sorry he felt about this and Chris was always saying that he understood. “He does understand,” his mother would say proudly. “He’s more understanding than a lot of grownups I know.” Such praise made Chris uncomfortable and he didn’t know why.
On Monday morning Chris bolted his breakfast so recklessly that Winnie, the maid, warned him against indigestion. Chris gulped down his milk (“so you’ll have nice strong bones”) and hurried out to the garage. James was already at work, stripped to his undershirt, washing the town car.
“Hi, Chris,” James said, as he hosed down the glossy maroon hood of the long custom-made Lincoln.
Chris liked the way the new chauffeur called him Chris right away. Not sonny or lad or buster or any of those drippy names the others had used. Chris stood as close as he could to James without getting wet, and watched in fascination the way the colored pictures on the chauffeur’s arm rippled into life as he worked his muscles. On his left arm was a a young, full-breasted woman without any clothes on, identified in purple letters as Jo-Ann. On his right arm was an American flag and curving around it in fancy letters: M-O-T-H-E-R. Chris had never seen anything like that before. Everything about this chauffeur was big and strong and different.
“You’ve got pictures on your arm,” Chris said.
James raised his hand modestly to shield the figure of Jo-Ann.
“That’s right. I’ve had ’em on so long I forgot all about ’em.”
“Don’t they come off when you take a bath?”
James explained the principle of tattooing to Chris.
“Little needles? Don’t they hurt a lot?”
“Sure they do. But we just grit our teeth and take it like a man. I’ll bet you don’t cry when you get hurt, do you, Chris?”
Chris had a tendency to cry more than he should at going-on-eleven. (“I don’t know why he should be such a nervous child,” his mother would say.) But now he said, “I hardly ever cry.”
“That’s a boy,” said James. “Here, hold this hose a minute. I’ll go put my shirt on.”
No one had ever asked Chris to help wash the cars before. It is hard to explain how important you can feel when you aren’t quite eleven and are trusted to hold a hose in your hand. If you stand too close to the car the water bounces back and splatters you. If you hold the hose too high the stream of water misses the car entirely and soaks the roadster and the tools in the garage. You have to do it just right.
In a few moments James was back with his uniform jacket on. It buttoned tight at the neckline like a Marine dress uniform and James wore it very well. “Thanks, Chris,” he said, taking the hose, “you did a nice job. Now you can turn the water off.”
Chris hastened to obey. James winked at him. “I can see you’re going to be a big help to me.”
“I’ll help you wash the cars every day,” Chris said proudly.
One of the big problems in Chris’s life was having to be driven to school in the town car. Sol Samuels, in a burst of democratic expression, had insisted that Chris go to the large public school bridging the exclusive Windsor Square section and the plebeian neighborhoods toward Western Avenue. The school reflected southern California’s cultural overlapping, for there were Mexicans, Japanese and Negroes as well as white children whose fathers were not heads or even assistant heads of movie studios. “I don’t want Chris to get any false ideas about people,” Mr. Samuels would lecture. “After all we came from New York’s Lower East Side. Our parents were driven out of Europe. And I try to make pictures for average people, that everybody can enjoy. I never want Chris to grow up a snob, and the best way to check that is to keep him in touch with the people.”
A noble speech, but, as in many of us, there were inconsistencies in Sol Samuels. On the wave of a magnificent bonus from the company, following a particularly profitable series of pictures, he had brought home the most remarkable automobile Chris had ever seen. Instead of having a long, sleek body like any ordinary expensive limousine, this one had a body like an old-fashioned royal coach crisscrossed in gold petit point.
It was an authentic eighteenth-century coach down to the smallest detail, with elaborate coach lights in gold, and gold-plated door handles. The chauffeur sat out in front under a canopy like a coachman. There was no worse torture, in Chris’s mind, than being driven to school in that outlandish car. The only way he could manage it at all was to flatten himself on the floor so no one could see him through the small oval side windows. Then he would insist on stopping down the block and across the street from the school entrance. There he would crawl out onto the sidewalk on his hands and knees, like a soldier in enemy country, then jump up suddenly and quickly walk away from the motorized monstrosity, as if he and it were total strangers.
James didn’t understand what Chris was doing that first morning when he saw him pressing himself against the floor of the coach. He laughed when Chris tried to explain it to him. “If I had a buggy like this I’d be proud of it,” he said. “Your old man made all this money because he had brains. Why should you be ashamed of that?”
It had something to do w
ith not wanting to be special, Chris knew, but he couldn’t explain it very well. On the way home James got him to come up and join him on the driver’s seat, once they were far enough away from school for Chris to feel relatively safe. Chris told James how he had been teased about the car. A Mexican boy who was the best fighter in the class had called him “Meester Reech Beech.” Had Chris told him to shut up and mind his own beeswax? James wanted to know. The possibility of such defiance was scary to Chris. Iggy Gonzalez was the human embodiment of danger and fierceness. He was a dark, wiry boy a year or so older than the other fifth graders. And his brother Chucho was the amateur feather-weight champion of greater Los Angeles. Chris could think of nothing more frightening than being forced into physical combat with Iggy Gonzalez.
James looked Chris over carefully. Chris had thin, long arms and legs. “Growing out of himself,” he had heard his mother describe it.
“Ever have any boxing lessons?” James asked.
No, Chris had gone to the Legion fights with his father, but he had never tried it himself.
“I fought a couple of semi-windups in the Legion seven, eight years ago,” James said. “I was runner-up to the champ of the Pacific Fleet when I was in the Navy, where I picked up the tattoos. How about you and me putting on the gloves? I’ll show you a few things that’ll knock Gonzalez’s head off. Then you can sit up here in front with me right up to the school door. And if anyone kids you, you tell ’em to shut up or else. Isn’t that better than hiding on the floor?”
The way James said it suddenly made it sound possible. Driving home under the canopy with this formidable James at his side, Chris let his mind explore heroic possibilities. His new, powerful self was flailing away at Iggy Gonzalez until the bigger boy slumped down at Chris’s feet. “You ween—I geev up—I have meet my master,” his former tormentor sobbed. With faultless magnanimity, Chris knelt beside his fallen foe to administer first aid. “Come on, I’ll drive you home in the car. You’ll be OK after you rest up. You’re a good man, Iggy, as brave as I ever fought.”
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 19